


Seldom a First Edition

by Anithene



Category: Bleach
Genre: Complete, F/M, One Shot, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-07
Updated: 2012-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 04:25:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anithene/pseuds/Anithene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kisuke thinks Soifon would be pretty, if she didn't scowl so much. Yoruichi thinks Byakuya isn't telling her the whole truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seldom a First Edition

“Come on, now. It’s not _that_ bad.”

Soifon raises sharp, gimlet eyes and glares at him, though they’re full of tears.

“You don’t know anything, you fool!”

Kisuke sighs and taps his fan against one hand. The paper makes a crinkling sound as he does so, and it’s a momentary distraction from the small woman hunched before him.

Jinta, Ururu, and Tessai are out today, flying kites at the park. The shop is quiet, and the surrounding neighborhood is near-silent, save for the occasional bird call or blare of a horn some distance away. Soifon cries quietly from her place across from him, the mug of tea by her knee growing cold, forgotten.

To be honest, Kisuke thinks she’s overreacting.

“It’s not the end of the world. Yoruichi isn’t a little girl, or one of your cat figurines. She’s a woman. You honestly couldn’t have expected her to be single forever.”

Tears are falling faster now, but the Captain’s dark eyes are full of hate.

“Of _course_ she isn’t one of my figurines, you damn idiot. You wouldn’t understand how I feel. I don’t know why I even came here.”

Kisuke is silent, and he fingers the brim of his hat in a thoughtful way.

“I can make a guess. She’s your idol, and you’re jealous that someone else has her attentions, am I right? You don’t like the thought of someone taking your place. It scares you, and makes you feel insignificant, yes? You don’t think she’ll ever be the same again, now that she has someone, _and it isn’t you.”_

He watches as her mouth falls open, just a little.

“Yes. No. How..?”

The scientist shrugs and tucks his fan away. “Lucky guess.”

She’s up and flying for him, then. He makes no protest as her hands fist into his green haori.

“Don’t you dare mock me, you traitorous vermin! If you weren’t Lady Yoruichi’s friend, I would kill you on the spot for mocking me and my feelings!”

Kisuke is perfectly calm, but his eyebrows go up into his hairline.

“I wasn’t mocking you, Soifon. Is what I said not true? It’s not hard to see. You’re quite transparent.”

She shoves him back. “Don’t call me by my first name. I am _Captain_ to you.”

He chuckles and stumbles, clumsily, a few steps backward. She may be small, but she has some strength in her. Even so, he knows it wouldn’t hurt to play along, make her think she’s winning.

“Of course, of course, Captain. My most sincere apologies. You seemed to have no problem with me calling you by your first name a century ago.”

Her shoulders tense beneath her white haori. The Shinigami Captain isn’t in a gigai, and Kisuke thinks the uniform is a tad big on her, with her small frame and tawny skin. Although her hair is different now, the cut suits her face, the shape of her eyes, but the harshness of it is misleading.

She’s just a girl, really, in grown-up clothes with a grown-up sword.

Her voice is edgy, full of smoke.

“Things have changed, Urahara. But my dislike for you has not.”

Kisuke snickers. “Really? I thought you _hated_ me. I seem to recall something about a deal between you and Hachi that involved me being locked in a binding spell not too long ago.”

For the first time since her arrival, Soifon smirks. Not a smile, but a smirk, and it makes Kisuke’s toes curl.

“I haven’t forgotten, either.”

Kisuke looks around as if expecting to be caged at any moment.

Soifon sighs, shoulders relaxing, and she sits back down, picking up her cup of tea. “Don’t sweat it. I haven’t forgotten, but you don’t need to worry about it now.”

She looks into it, but doesn’t drink. The evening light shines in her dark hair and adds a glow to her face, tear-stained though it may be. Kisuke thinks she’d be pretty, if she didn’t scowl so much. Or try to kill people quite so often.

He sits back down and lifts the ceramic teapot to refill the cup, leaning slightly toward her, and he feels her spirit energy flicker, ever so.

Her dark eyes aren’t quite as fierce as she lifts her head to look at him.

The man feels his throat go dry, and Kisuke licks his lips, tries to speak, fails.

Soifon drops the cup of tea, and he barely has time to set the teapot down before she leans into him, so he can secure her in his arms. The liquid spills and soaks through the knees of their clothing, and her lips taste vaguely of it when he kisses them, her tongue in his mouth, hands in his hair. The hat falls to the floor.

His stubble is ticklish as Soifon runs her hand over his cheek, and he moans, the masculine sound shuddering through her. She feels his hands slip beneath the haori to rub, palm flat, over her bare back, and his chest is crushed against hers in a way that’s comforting, slightly.

Soifon sucks his lower lip between her teeth to draw blood, the tang like steel on her tongue.

This is her first kiss, she realizes. And it is not with Lady Yoruichi.

She shoves him back suddenly, out of breath like she’d just killed a Hollow, her lips smeared with his blood and his kiss. Soifon grins and wipes it away with one thumb, but her eyes are hard again.

Kisuke swallows, his clothes and hair in disarray, the tea seeping through the floor mats. His eyes follow her as she stands, head down, that jet black hair shadowing her face, and she pulls her haori into its proper place again.

Soifon turns her back, and the number printed on her uniform makes him feel cold.

“I still hate you,” she says, and is gone.

 

*****

“I don’t hate you,” he says.

Yoruichi looks at him from over one shoulder, her back and arms bare of the orange jacket. Her eyelashes are slightly lowered to match the line of her mouth. A light wind picks up strands of her plum colored hair and blows it, shyly, against her cheek.

The Kuchiki gardens are as beautiful as always. Byakuya has made slight modifications since his grandfather was head of the clan, but it suits him; white hydrangeas, gardenias, and pine, and a stream runs through where the rock garden had been, the water recently thawed, early summer kissing the world alive, again.

He stands before a gathering of red spider lilies. The kenseikan and scarf are gone, and she thinks the dark blue yukata flatters his skin nicely. The haori draped over his shoulders is the color of a butterfly cocoon.

Yoruichi sighs, half of it stuck in her chest.

“You could have fooled me.”

From the corner of her eye, she sees him frown.

“I have disagreed with your methods and your reasoning. But I do not hate you.”

She turns to face him, dark arms crossed beneath her breasts, chin tucked down a little. Her gait is loose as she walks around the flowers, inspecting them carelessly, unwilling to meet his gaze. He’s only telling part of the truth, and Yoruichi doesn’t want to hear it, although she knows what he’d say.

The Shihouin princess kneels before a blossoming gardenia and brings it closer to her, its scent light and fragrant, and from within its petals, her eyes flick to his face. The yellow of them and the white of the flower are like the sun and the moon.

“You’re still a terrible liar, Byakuya Kuchiki. You didn’t just ‘disagree’ with my actions. You hated them. And you have, for quite some time, hated me, too.”

His eyes waver. She isn’t sure what color they are, now; gray, violet, black?

Her gaze follows his hand as he curls one long finger around the stem of a spider lily, thumb sliding along the underside in an almost erotic way.

_When did she stop thinking of him as her Little Byakuya?_

Without the scarf, the length of his throat is elegant without being feminine, and Yoruichi is fascinated with the movement of his Adams apple when he speaks. She doesn’t like the downward curve of his eyes as he lowers his head.

“For a time, I did hate you. You were my mentor and the closest thing I had to a friend in my childhood. You frustrated me with your nonchalant attitude, concerning your rank, your birth, and the people who cared about you. I often wondered why I wasn’t good enough to make you stay, or, in the very least, reconsider your actions.

It was only after my wife died that I entertained the thought of you being dead, as well. Even if you weren’t, I still mourned you as if you _were_ dead.”

Yoruichi can’t read his expression, his mouth is neither frowning nor smiling, and there’s a guarded, raw quality to him as he looks at her.

“But now, I’ve come to understand some of the motivation behind your resolve. You did what you thought was right. Whereas you were willing to risk your life and position to save someone you cared for, I could not. For that, you have my respect, Yoruichi Shihouin. But part of me still disagrees with you.”

Byakuya lets go of the flower and tucks his arms, casually, into the part of his yukata, and this casualness makes her grin. He isn’t stiff and defensive like most men would be after such a confession. Although over one-hundred years have taken the loudmouthed teenager away from her, it’s replaced him with someone new, and Yoruichi is surprised to find that this isn’t a bad thing.

He’s grown into a man better than most, but that, however, doesn’t startle her in the least.

Yoruichi rises, a quick, fluid jerk of her torso and arms, and the smile she used to smile when they played tag is back on her lips. In a breath, she’s in front of him, the wind blowing her hair away from her head and curtaining their faces, her eyes shining, feline, playful.  
  
She reaches up to run one finger, lazily, down the bridge of his nose.

“Tag,” she whispers, “you’re it.”

They’re both off and racing, so fast everything is one lineless blur of color, wind whipping past their ears and through clothing, and whose laughter is the loudest, Yoruichi can’t tell. They race far away from the Seireitei, past paved streets and stone houses, into fields of grain and gravel, the sun shining.

She lets him catch her.

Everything slows down; the motion of her hair as it flies loose from the tie, his hands moving to grip her upper arms, the push and sway of tall, wild sunflowers in the field around them. Byakuya likes how the sunlight looks in her eyes as he tilts her chin up with one hand, and her fingers are splayed warmly against the side of his neck.

He doesn’t know who leans in first. It doesn’t really matter. Her mouth is warm like summer, and it fills him with something he can’t place, but it’s familiar. Yoruichi’s hand slides up his neck to run a few fingers behind his ear, then into his hair, the gentle scrape of her fingernails on his scalp tingling.

Byakuya hooks one arm around her waist, bringing his other hand to the side of her face; close, claustrophobic, wanting. She sighs into his mouth as he sucks on her tongue, nibbles her lips, she grins through the kiss before doing the same. He can’t remember ever being kissed like this.

This will be his first kiss since Hisana’s death.

The firmness of his body only reconstitutes her earlier recognition of him as a man, Yoruichi’s sure beneath the yukata there are scars, but she has time to discover them, the ones inside and out. She hears him groan when she runs her tongue beneath his upper lip, dabbing it on the corners of his mouth, before softly biting down.

She curses the need to breathe as they pull apart. The wind is still blowing, creating a dark halo about his face before her, and the ends of her own violet strands tickle irritatingly against Yoruichi’s neck. Byakuya’s eyes are gray, she notices. Gray, with just a little violet in them.

Byakuya kisses her forehead, and Yoruichi lets her hands slide down his chest, fingers tucking into his obi. She doesn’t pull, only lets them rest there, the warmth of his skin, the scent of his clothing, surrounding her like a haze, secure-feeling.

Yoruichi steps back, the feminine curve of her lips, newly kissed, softening with a smile. She runs a hand through her loose hair, securing a lock behind her ear, only to have it come down again. They don’t say anything. Byakuya nods, quickly, each end of his mouth rising just slightly.

He lets her go. She’ll be back.


End file.
